“The Reach campaign has maintained a very strong vision from the beginning. We started pre-production with a very small team just after Halo3 finished. We built this massive military campaign at first, just so we could understand what all was happening on the planet and make sure we weren’t stomping on the huge back story that we created.

We were building completely independent mission ideas – things that just got us super excited – things we’ve never done before in our Halo games. As the story solidified, so did the mission progression. This was the point where we had to make some tough choices. Some of the crazy mission ideas just didn’t fit in with the overall scope of the game. It was sad to see some of these go away, but the game and story all benefited by us focusing on what we believed was the right thing to do.”